DataSpace

Data Visualization

David Karger

February 8, 2010

NSF Site Visit to MIT DataSpace1

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Visualization Drives Insight

• We need visualizations to help us understand our data– Formulate hypotheses– Then test/confirm them

• We use visualizations to communicate our insights to others

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Visualizing Heterogeneous Data

• We propose to make data more available• Which will encourage scientists to gather it

across disciplines• How will they look at it once they have it?– Discipline-specific visualization tools won’t know

what to do with other Disciplines’ data• We need data-agnostic visualization tools– Must we recourse to spreadsheets?

February 8, 2010

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Visualization Ontologies

• We can ontologize the different ways of looking at information– Selection of attributes, layout, means of filtering

• View descriptions can travel with the data• Ontology-aware tools can generate suitable

visualizations on a variety of platforms• Scientists can publish their visualizations with

their conclusions

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Fresnel Visualization OntologyLongwell Browser

• dsp:publicationFacets rdf:type facets:FacetSet; facets:facets ( dc:type dc:publisher dc:contributor dc:subject ); facets:types ( ow:Publication ) . dsp:publicationLabelLens rdf:type :Lens; :classLensDomain ow:Publication; :group gr:group; :purpose :labelLens; :showProperties ( dc:title ) .dsp:publicationLens rdf:type :Lens; :classLensDomain ow:Publication; :group gr:group; :purpose :defaultLens; :showProperties ( dc:description dc:identifier dc:creator dc:contributor dc:date dc:subject dc:type dc:publisher dc:rights ) . dsp:creatorFormat rdf:type :Format; :group gr:group; :propertyFormat [ rdf:type :FormatDescription ; :contentNoValue "[none]" ];

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Exhibit Framework

• In-HTML-document visualization ontology• Author creates a data set– Excel spreadsheet, tabbed file, XML file, JSON

• Then writes HTML document– Specify view by embedding HTML “tags” from viz

ontology• Our javascript makes the data-interactive viz

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Deployment

• Deployed 2 years ago• Hundreds of exhibits created in the wild• Healthy open source community– Fixing bugs, extending with new views

• Timeline on opendata.gov for several months

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INSIDE A WIKI

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OR A BLOG

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Going Forward

• Refine our understanding of the universal concepts of information visualization

• Deploy domain-independent tools that can use visualization descriptions to create effective visualizations of arbitrary data drawn from many locations– Data comes with its visualization descriptions– Fed to specialized widgets that fit the descriptions

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What Widgets?

• Descriptions aren’t programs• Won’t implement highly specialized views– Gene map, pie chart, heat map, star chart, scatter

plot, chemical bond diagram…• But these views can be

implemented/packaged/downloaded for incorporation into the visualizers– Visualization “app store”

• Then referenced in viz description

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Scientific Publication

• At present, all our rich interactive visualization tools are inside the lab

• When it’s time to publish, we use papers with dead ink charts

• Move to publication of rich visualization descriptions inside the article

• Show the reader not just conclusions, but the way you looked at your data to reach them

February 8, 2010

NSF Site Visit to MIT DataSpace30